The Ant Colony

“Put that key back for me, would you?” she said, and I reached up and put it back above the doorframe. She noticed my watch. It has a thick strap. I always wear it. “What’s the time?” she said.

“Four thirty-six.”

“Well, what are you standing here for, at that hour?” she said, and she sent me back to my room and shut the door behind her, like she’d forgotten I was only standing there because of her.

I couldn’t go back to sleep. Someone was boiling a kettle in the flat upstairs. I heard the plug going into the socket, the switch click to ON, the thrum of the water bubbling on the counter top. I heard an alarm clock somewhere beep seventeen and a half times and then stop. I heard the scrape and warble of pigeons waking up on the windowsill.

I pictured the walls and ceilings and floors separating everyone in their little boxes. I thought about how thin they were, and what might be between them, like dust and mice and lost letters, like feathers and crumbling plaster and hundred-year-old wallpaper. I thought about everyone in the whole city, alone in our boxes like squares on graph paper, like scales on a fish, like ants.

Now I was an ant, maybe Max would’ve liked to study me, navigating my way round the Tube, walking down a crowded street without colliding, stacking shelves and watching them empty again, sweeping my floor, putting the rubbish out.

Do ants know that they are working for the colony? That whatever little job they get to do until they die actually forms a meaningful part of the whole? Do they know that? Because I certainly didn’t.

Have you ever done that thing where you interrupt a line of ants? They’re all moving along, no questions asked, filled with a sense of purpose, and you draw a line across their path in the mud or the sand or whatever, just a line, with a stick or your shoe or an empty vinegar bottle. The ants in front of the line carry on like nothing happened, like there’s nothing to worry about. They don’t look back. But the ones behind the line, the ones who walk into it, they lose the plot. It’s like they all go insane and run around tearing their hair out because they’ve got no idea what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. Like they’ve forgotten everything they ever knew.

Max hated it when I did that. It drove him crazy.

That’s what I was wondering, sitting in my room listening to other people who didn’t know that I existed. If Max was watching me then from above, what side of the line in the ants was I on?

A few nights later I bumped into the old lady again in the hallway. It wasn’t late. I was going out for some air because I’d been in my room all day. She came out of her flat just before I got to the front door.

“Ah, Country,” she said. “Come in, meet the neighbours.”

I didn’t want to meet anyone. I shook my head. “No thanks,” I said, and I opened the door. I could see a slice of blackish, street-lit sky. I could smell the warm metal and dust of outside.

“You’ve got to meet the neighbours,” she said.

“No, it’s all right.”

The door was properly open now. Two people walked past on the street, a man and a woman, and they glanced up at me in the light of the hall for less than a second. My shadow was long down the front steps.

She said, “What are you on about, ‘No, it’s all right’? It’s the rules. I have to introduce you.”

I said I’d rather she didn’t.

“What do you mean?”

She was standing in the doorway now and I was halfway to the pavement. I couldn’t really see her face because the light was behind her.

“I don’t want to meet the neighbours,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” she said. She pushed the door shut in front of her, its rectangle of light on the street disappearing in one quick, diminishing movement.

“I will,” I said to nobody at all.

I wasn’t out for long. I walked about. I sat on a bench at the canal. I watched people in cafes and bars to see what they were doing with their time. I got a newspaper and stared at some TV through the window at Dixons for a bit.

When I got back the lights were still on at the old lady’s house. I could see them from the street. Inside, the door to her flat was open. I heard her moving around, heard the muffled sound of her voice and the tap of the dog’s feet somewhere, like fingers on a table. I leaned my head against the edge of the front door and watched the sky slice squeeze to nothing while I closed it without making a sound.

“What’s your name, anyway?” she said suddenly close behind me, before I’d even turned around.

“God, you made me jump,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said. She asked me my name again.

“Sam.”

She repeated it, like she was testing it for something.

“I’m Isabel,” she said. “Meet the neighbours for five minutes and I won’t ask you to do anything ever again.”

What a good liar.

Her place was crowded and tiny, like someone had pushed the walls together after she’d moved her furniture in, like the storeroom of a bad antique shop.

Steve was there, the landlord, wearing sunglasses inside, something I think you’re allowed to hold against a person as soon as you meet them. The dog was in one chair, his nose tucked down between the arm and the cushion, the whites of his eyes new moons as he glanced up at me and breathed out hard with pure boredom. In the other chair there was a hungry-looking bloke with a big pale beard his face was way too small for. He frowned at me and licked his lips, which looked lost in the middle of all that hair. His sweatshirt was the colour of dead grass. He had a full size tattoo of a gun on the side of his calf. It was poking out of his sock like it was a holster. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it once I knew it was there.

And on the arm of his chair there was a woman called Cherry, thin and blonde and pretty, and just about the tiredest person I ever saw. Her nails were bitten so low, so close to where they started, I couldn’t look at them. Her fingers were covered in rings.

Isabel introduced me as Country. Steve nodded at me behind his shades and clinked the ice cubes in his glass. Cherry waved with one hand and covered a yawn with the other.

“Mick,” the man in the chair said. “You walked in on me in the bathroom the other day.”

Steve said to Mick, “You probably woke him up the night before chucking your stuff out of the window.”

“Sorry,” I said, and he grunted at Steve, something about getting a lock on the door that worked.

“Oh, cheer up, Mick,” Isabel said. “There’s always someone worse off than you. Take Country here. Not a friend in the world.”

“Really?” Mick said, perking up a bit, like this was good news.

“Not a soul,” Isabel said, patting me on the arm.

She started explaining where everybody lived: Steve in the basement, her on the ground floor, me and the bathroom on the next, Mick on the third floor and Cherry and her daughter at the top.

“Welcome to the madhouse,” Steve said, and drained his glass.

There was a silence then that I wasn’t going to fill. Cherry stared out of the window, chewing at her nails. Isabel said she was going to get me a drink. Steve followed her out.

Cherry lit a cigarette and dragged on it like there was something at the very end she was looking for. She had too much make-up on. When she brought her hand up to her mouth it looked like somebody else’s hand entirely, somebody paler and older.

Mick said to nobody in particular, “Why are we here?”

I didn’t know if he meant there, in Isabel’s room, or in London, or even alive, and I had no idea of how to answer him.

I got up and tried to see out of the windows. There was a spiral staircase down to a tiny yard, like five hay bales side by side. There were window boxes crammed with rainbashed petunias. Inside, Isabel’s sofas matched the curtains and the carpet was a pond-weed green. There were a couple of paintings on the walls, of ships and insipid landscapes, and they might have some value to an old lady, but they didn’t mean anything to me. The most interesting thing in the room by a mile was a clay head on top of a bookcase, a peaceful man with a wide nose and closed eyes. I liked the tight curl of his hair, the fingerprint marks of the hands that had made him on his skin.

Isabel came back with the drinks and sat down in the chair next to Doormat. I stayed standing until she told me to stop it and then I knelt on the floor.